Murder is Everywhere

You Can Go Home Again, Kind Of, Sort Of...

2013-05-19T02:39:00.001-04:00

Lately, I've had the very interesting experience of spending some time in my hometown, after more than 25 years away.

When it comes to hometowns, I'm luckier than most. I was born and raised in San Diego, California. It's the sort of place where people come to vacation. Growing up, it seemed pretty normal to me. It took me years to realize that the rest of the United States wasn't like California.

The city has changed quite a lot in recent years. It's a lot more interesting, overall—more liberal, more cultural, more cosmopolitan. When I was a kid, San Diego seemed to be in a massive civic denial that it was on the border of another country--basically the attitude was, "Let's pretend we're Iowa, except with better weather by an ocean!" I have the sense that, overall, there's more acceptance and embrace of this being in part a Mexican city, inextricably bound to Tijuana across the border and to Mexico as a whole. It's possible this is me being a utopian optimist, but I hope I'm right.

I've been exploring the neighborhood where I lived when I was in high school, where my parents still live. It's...interesting. As you head south, it's a pretty spread out, designed more for cars than for people, with a broad street paralleling the freeway called Morena Blvd.

A lot of nuts and bolts sort of businesses, building supply stores, paint, tile, woodwork. I took a walk, and took a few photos.. This was the first place that caught my eye, in a "really, WTF is this?" kind of way:

"Not in association with Local 325"

These are the kinds of businesses you find along the way:

But there are some interesting things going on in some of these formerly industrial spaces...

Not sure what was going on here, but it looked interesting

This was totally cool

There were a number of "hard-core," "Old-school" gyms, including a Russian kettle-ball academy:

And, I guess it wouldn't be America if there weren't one of these:

One of the most interesting things that's happened in San Diego is that the city has become a center of craft brewing in the United States. Like, one of the top three cities in the country. Throw a baseball, hit a microbrewery, including some larger scale operations like Stone Brewing, Ballast Point, Coronado Brewing Company and Green Flash that have become nationally known and that have won a bunch of awards. There happen to be two brewery/tasting rooms in this neighborhood, just a short walk from each other: Ballast Point's Home Brewing Center, and Coronado Brewing's Company's brewery and tasting room.

Oh, man. If you like good beer at all, this is pretty much heaven. San Diego brewers do a lot of interesting, off-beat and downright delicious beers. One consequence of this is that you have to work pretty hard to go to a San Diego restaurant or venue that does not have delicious, fresh, local beer available.

Also in the neighborhood -- awesome bar specializing in Ballast Point brews

Petco Park, home of the San Diego Padres, is a veritable craft beer Mecca:

Also, you can get Filippi's by the slice. Baseball, Filippi's, great craft beer...Heaven!

It's amazing how many people here take beer very seriously. At the baseball game, I had a couple discussions about Sculpin IPA (available on draft!). People are into this.

And what's interesting is that as the craft beer scene has grown and developed, the whole localvore/food scene has as well. I mean, there's an honest-to-gawd gastropub on Morena Blvd:

Yummy!

Which really makes a lot of sense to me. You see people making all this wonderful craft beer, and it's not very much of a step to start appreciating food more as well, maybe even to get local with with it. Maybe think more about the quality of what you're eating, and where it comes from, how it's produced. What that all means. Maybe you start questioning whether it's such a good idea to eat mass-produced meat dosed with antibiotics and chemicals, pesticide-ladened vegetables, processed food full of sugar and GMOs. And how that has the potential to lead to all kinds of really interesting movements with political ramifications.

In other words, good beer will save the world!

Lisa -- Sunday...

Greece's Sun and Moon God Twins: Apollo and Artemis

2013-05-18T00:00:00.000-04:00

I had dinner the other night at one of my favorite places on Mykonos, a bamboo-capped, white stone shack perched at the bottom of a waning crescent moon beach close-by the old town. It’s called Niko’s Place but everyone knows it as Joanna’s (to distinguish it from the better known and also delightful Niko’s Taverna just off the old port). It’s nestled in a cove on what once was the island’s most famous beach, Megali Ammos, before new roads made dozens of other beaches readily accessible.

For me, there’s no more beautiful spot for sunset than Joanna’s. The sea shimmers in combinations of gun-metal blue, silver, and gold against a backdrop of vermilion skies and shadowy forms of distant islands. But for a lone white church with a blood red roof on the tiny island of Baou at the entrance to the bay, nothing in view suggests that the hand of man played a part in any of this––unless of course you look sharply to the left or right. But no one comes here to do that. This is a place for remembering simpler times and watching a glowing orange ball fade below the horizon.

On a clear day (as most are) you can see Tinos to the right, Syros dead ahead, and a bit of Rhenia (or big Delos, as the locals call it) off to the left. Delos is out there too, around a bend to the left and less than a mile away. I wrote about Delos in my very first Murder is Everywhere post.

It’s hard not to think of Delos as you watch the sunset. After all, Delos is where Apollo, god of the sun, and his twin-sister, Artemis, the original divine personification of the moon were born to their mother, Leto, out of her assignation with Zeus. Delos wasn’t Leto’s first choice for a delivery room, because back then it was little more than a rock bouncing around the Aegean Sea. But she had little choice because Zeus’ wife (and sister—more about that here), Hera, had the world fearing her jealous wrath, and only tiny Delos saw nothing to lose in making a “You take care of me, I’ll take care of you bargain” with Zeus.

Birth of Artemis and Apollo to Leto

From the moment of Apollo’s birth, when golden light flooded down upon Delos, the island prospered, so much so that it rose to emerge as one of antiquity’s bastions of commerce and religiosity.

But Apollo didn’t stick around his birthplace very long. Jealous Hera drove Leto away from her children forcing Apollo to grow up quickly—in a matter of hours to be precise (on a diet of nectar and ambrosia)—and begin a pilgrimage that launched his myth, one of the oldest of all Greek myths and one of the few of entirely Greek creation (as opposed to foreign influences).

Although Apollo’s exploits gave rise to his being known by many different names and titles—Karneios, Hyakinthios, Pythios, Thargelios, Nomios, Delphinios, Ismenios, Hebdomeios, Lykios, Musagetes, etcetera—they all in one way or another derived from his link to the eternal operation of the sun and all that the ancients attributed to it.

In much the same way Apollo’s sister, Artemis, found that the qualities attributed to the moon—bringing fertility to the earth through cool, dew filled nights and casting light into the dark night offering protection to flocks and hunters—had her identified with those traits (fertility, hunting) and called by names and titles linked to those perceived powers of the moon: Agrotora, Kalliste, Diktynna, Britomartis, Eleuthro, Orthia, Limnaia, Potamia, Munychia, Brauronia, Amarynthia, etcetera.

Adonis and Artemis

As a duet, Apollo and Artemis might be best known for a bloody, Bonnie and Clyde-style episode brought on by an affront to their mother (and them) by the daughter of a king who boasted that her own children were “more beautiful” than Leto’s. Talk about perturbing the wrong folk. Artemis and Apollo promptly punished the prideful mother (Niobe) by slaying all of her children, Artemis by arrows the daughters, and Adonis by arrows the sons. In her anguish the mother turned to stone.

On the off chance I’ve written something that a buddy of those Delosian twins might find offensive, please don’t come looking for me. You’ll want to talk to Alexander S. Murray who wrote Who’s Who in Mythology. It’s his book that’s responsible for driving this post…so help me gods.

Jeff—Saturday

Fact and Fiction. The Crime Writers' Responsibility?

2013-05-17T00:30:00.000-04:00

I recall being at a forensics event where my good pal the crime writer Alex Gray was speaking. It was a few days after the spree killing in Cumbria where Derrick Bird had killed 12 people. Bird had shot his twin brother eleven times then drove to the office of the family solicitor and killed him also. Derrick was a taxi driver himself when he opened fire on four other taxi drivers, killing the only one he actually knew. The police considered them targeted shootings, but Bird then went on a random spree killing another nine people.

Alex

Bird was a granddad, described as a popular and quiet man. There have been many reasons speculated, a family feud over money, he had just been rejected by a Thai girl he had met on holiday and three of the dead had worked at the Sellafield power plant where Bird had been accused of stealing wood, found guilty and received a twelve month suspended sentence.

Derrick Bird

Against that background, Alex had to stand up and promote crime fiction to the police and forensic staff who deal with these tragedies day in and day out. It was a tough call.

She started her speech by saying that she wasn't that proud to be a crime writer on that particular day. I understood what she meant but it's not something that has ever troubled me in particular. Real people commit real crimes. We write stories that amuse people waiting in airports and in dentists' waiting rooms. We set puzzles for people to solve. The two things are miles apart.

But thinking about it, I realise that I do have some reservations about a crime writing friend of mine who openly admits that all her fiction is based on fact. She cuts stories out of newspapers, changes the name, sexes them up a bit and hey presto there's a new novel. So much that the real people involved are recognisable in the fiction. I also remember listening to a TV scriptwriter who said that she bought stories from victims of crime to use in her TV series. Big ones to base the series on and smaller stories to act as background. (I think she called the little ones stringers). I then watched the TV show, the story was based on the murder of a four year old child who had been killed and put in a drain pipe. I knew it was based on a true story - and I couldn't watch it.

I can watch true documentary of crime as long as they are well made, but not drama based on fact...because at the end of the day it is entertainment based on the tragic death of somebody's son, somebody's daughter. Even in fiction, I think it is a big turn off for the reader when the murder becomes a technical exercise, with it having no emotional effect on anybody, especially the investigative team.

It's a line I think we all have to draw somewhere.

However to balance that I do believe that crime writers have a chip of ice in their heart, as do most medics. You need to have an investigative mind. As soon as the empathy is over, the investigation begins - the what if's, and the why's, and all the other questions.

I've thought a fair bit about including this case in this blog, as it is close to the bone. If I had read it in a fictional novel, it is fascinating, reading a factual account would be interesting

but as it happened in the last week, not to somebody that I know, but somebody who is a friend of a good friend it's a bit raw but also serves as an example that we should be aware of the tight rope that we walk sometimes.

Margaret and Nicola

This case raises all kinds of questions, something that we might never get to the bottom of. It is a tragedy in every sense of the word.

It concerns a mother and daughter, two very normal people from Paisley. Margaret was 52, a nice, happy woman, committed politically - she had stood for the Lib Dems in two local elections - a hard working woman, mother of five grown up kids, foster mother to another two. She was divorced but on very good terms with her ex husband.

Her daughter Nicola was 23, a graduate in social work and was working for a local charity.

Then last week something went drastically and horribly wrong.

On Thursday at 9am, Margaret dropped off one of the children at nursery in Paisley. She is then seen with Nicola in Balloch at about 11am. The 17 hours after that are confusing. At 2pm Margaret fails to pick up the child from the nursery, the staff alert the family, the police pay a visit to the family home at night as a routine call. But it's not in Margaret character to fail to turn up where she was expected. There are now concerns about their welfare.

Premier Inn, Courtesy of The Daily Record

Later it was discovered they had driven to Greenock and checked into the Premier Inn (which is a respectable motel type of place ideal for short stays for business men, overnight stays for early morning flights etc)

On Thursday night, they are both spotted in Linwood and Paisley, before returning to the Premier Inn somewhere between 12.30 and 1 am.

The last known movements- courtesy of the Scotsman

The tragedy unfolds at 7am the next morning, when a guest of the inn walking along the corridor discovers Nicola, lying badly injured in the hall. Her mother is found in a nearby room. The wounds have been described as slash wounds.

Both are rushed to hospital, the mother is critical, the daughter is serious. Margaret died later in hospital. Nicola held onto life for two more days, her dad holding a vigil at her bedside. Then she too passed away from her injuries.

The local papers are all screaming blood bath.

But it has to be noted that the police, very early on said that they were not looking for any third party. Vague sources (who refuse to be named) say that there may have been a suicide pact between mother and daughter and that an amount of paracetamol was found in the room. As yet the police do not have the results of any tox screen.

The police are still very keen to find out why they were driving around the area back tracking on themselves, why book an inn less than twenty miles from where they lived? And so the questions go on, so the chip of ice eats away. And I'm sure it is eating away at their family and friends more than anyone.

The police as yet have given no indication as to cause of death, but they have confirmed that the family was not known to them.

The whys and the what ifs - the strange drive, the last few hours, what was going on in that room, why did nobody hear, why did nobody help, could anybody have helped... we just don't know... and we may never know.

Maybe at the end of the day it is none of our business.

It's all very sobering and a reminder that we do have some responsibility in what we write, and that we shrug off that responsibility at our peril. But I'm sure that some crime writers take comfort in trying to make sense of such heartbreak.

Here's Nicola in happier terms, a clever, bonnie lassie with everything in life ahead of her. Like I said, a huge tragedy.

Caro GB 17/05/2013

SOETE SONDER END

2013-05-16T10:19:00.000-04:00

This is a story of love, courage, and feet-on-the-ground entrepreneurship.

I don't have any children of my own, but I love kids in general. So when my late brother's eldest son, Ivor, and his wife, Marie Louise, had a daughter, Maya, 22 months ago, I appointed myself as honorary grandpa. This was made a little easier by the fact that they live in a South African village called Riviersonderend (River without end) only a three-and-a-half-hour drive from the small town of Knysna (pronounced NY-ZNUH) where I spend half the year.

The two never had much money, and they ran an outlet in Riviersonderend for Marie's father, selling the South African delicacy called biltong to travellers on the N2 - the main road along the south and east coasts of South Africa. Biltong - dried, seasoned meat similar to but tastier than jerky - is extremely popular, so they managed to keep the hyenas from the door. But barely so, especially after baby Maya arrived.

Marie-Louise was very worried about their financial situation and decided to take matters into her own hands, amply assisted by Ivor. What follows is her account that I took from Facebook of how she started a small business called Soete Sonder End, which means Sweets (or Candies) Without End. Marie-Louise has Afrikaans as her first language; Ivor's is English. Both are bilingual, and Maya will have two first languages.

_____________________________

THE STORY OF SOETE SONDER END AND HOW IT ALL STARTED

I started making fudge for our biltong shop two years ago with the idea to supplement our income. Using my grandmother's recipe and after loads of tears and many late nights, we finally got a great product.

I was six months pregnant and woke up one morning feeling very discouraged, thinking how will we be able to look after little Maya if we don't even have enough for ourselves. I asked the Lord to please give me guidance.

That same week, my housemaid Christine's husband accidentally stepped onto their 4 month old puppy which led to a broken hip. That Friday morning we took the puppy “Ounooi” to the SPCA. After a long wait the vet told us that he will have to operate and we will have to put down R800 (about $100) on Monday or they will have to put Onooi down. Christine was in tears...

That night I could not sleep, trying to figure out how we are going to get the money in two days? The next morning I woke up and phoned Christine telling her she better hurry up, we are going to make fudge and sell it in town.

The Golf Club had a golf day on and everybody told us we should try and sell our fudge there as well. Andre, the captain of the club, was so kind to tell the whole sad story at the prize giving and auctioned the fudge starting at a R100! Some people were even willing to pay a R150!

By the end of the day we made R800! What a wonderful closed knit community we have, I thought to myself, everybody is always willing to help.

They absolutely loved the fudge and it made me realize that maybe I should take this further. The Lord gave me the guts to go out there and sell my product. The next week I got into my car starting at the Oumeul Bakery in town and went all the way down the N2...

I must say my big belly helped a lot because a lot of people could not say no to a pregnant lady....

Two years later we have 6 ladies in our employ. Making our own condensed milk and producing over two tonnes of fudge a month. We supply close to 250 shops and are now also making coconut ice. We have plans to start making our own butter soon. The feedback we get from our customers is very positive, and they are always asking us what we are going to make next.

Marie-Louise

_________________________

Obviously I'm very biased in this case, but I love to see people work hard to make things better for themselves. Marie-Louise and her staff make the soete, and Ivor delivers all them over the Western Cape. The only downside I see to the enterprise is that it is taking time away from Marie-Louise's artistic expression. On the wall is a large mosaic that I commissioned from her a few years ago.

Throughout all of this, Ivor and Marie-Louise are truly equal parents - a pleasure to watch. And Maya is one happy kid.

Thank you for indulging my sentimental side.

Stan - Thursday

On the rocks

2013-05-15T17:07:00.003-04:00

There is a difference between Europeans and Americans that I have noted from observations in restaurants on each side of the Atlantic. Nothing huge and it only applies in general. Europeans do not like lots of ice in their soft drinks and Americans do. If you buy a glass of coke on an extremely hot day in Europe you will get one or two ice cubes that will melt away before you can bring the glass to your scorched lips. In America you will get all the ice you want and your drink is guaranteed to be very cold. This is just a matter of taste – I am sure the drink does the same magic irrespective of its temperature – within a certain range of course.

Personally I like ice since I like cold drinks when thirsty. My husband would rather skip the ice in his. Since we are both European one might think it counter my theory about the difference in European and American tastes regarding ice cubes but it does not. It actually is the basis of another theory, one based on a two person sample. This theory is that it is in childhood when one develops the taste for cold American drinks or not so cold European ones. I spent part of my childhood in America and my husband all of his here in Iceland.

It is interesting that of all matter in the world the only non-metallic substance that starts expanding when about to freeze is water. Other materials contract. The general rule is the hotter matter is the more energy it has to overcome the ties that bind – hence it expands. But water, once frozen takes up 9% more space than it did when in its liquid state. A bit like expenses, they usually expand to 9% over income.

This anomaly is extremely beneficial for us humans. Not because we like the occasional drink on the rocks and would prefer them floating on the top and not lying at the bottom of the glass. The benefit is much greater than that. And it also applies equally to elephants, birds, worms and fish. As well as all the other animals that I can’t remember. But especially the fish.

Great, great......great grandfather many times removed - a fish out of water

If water behaved like other liquids it would contract when frozen and become denser and heavier. It would therefore freeze from bottom up or what froze on the surface would sink to the bottom, killing all bottom vegetation. And this would mean all other life in this water could not survive which is serious stuff since all life not only originated in water but evolved there. So our relative the fish that grew lungs and legs would never have grazed on that prehistoric water bank, looked around and thought: not bad. No sharks, no currents. Warm. Not bad at all.

Life on earth as we know it is all because of water expanding when frozen.

So we can thank life to the behaviour of water, or more precisely the behaviour of ice. Meaning that Iceland is a very nice name for a country. No matter how you like your drinks.

Oddly enough this started off as a post about lava.

Yrsa - Wednesday

Madame Pierrette la belle Resistant

2013-05-14T00:00:00.000-04:00

Madame Pierrette Rossi or Villars, her nom de Guerre, is 97 years old and was a Resistant in Lyon during the war. Just a month before Lyon was liberated she was denounced and deported on the last convoy to Ravensbruck. She had coffee with me on a sunny afternoon in Paris, a block from her apartment on Blvd de Montparnasse. With her helper, a lovely woman from the Ukraine, we spent several hours and Madame explained more about her exploits during the war.
"I was on the last convoy, just my luck," she said. Her father ran a printing press, her mother had died when she was seven months old, while her grandmother helped raise her and her sister 'laissez-faire' giving her an independence. Pierrette has a certain resilience, fiestiness and little time for fools but a warmth that shines through. She's also a bit deaf, and speaks loudly for which she apologizes. She's also trés belle, a beautiful woman and if that photo reveals anything of the past, she was also a trés belle young woman. A Catholic. In 1939 when the war started Pierrette said it wasn't a conscious decision but her grandmother knew a contact in the Resistance. She never 'chose' this but she needed to breathe, to fight against 'les Nazi's'. She distributed tracts (anti-German Nazi notices and essays and news). One time she hid arms in the Academic Center, a burocratic office where she worked. Other times she rode a bike to give and take info to the Maquis, the underground paramilitary groups of men and women who hid in the countryside. Pierrette spoke of the fires they made to light the makeshift countryside runway for the British Lysander planes who dropped parachutes with money, arms and men. In Lyon the Resistance was made of people from all different social classes; shopkeepers, teachers and communists, anarchists and foreign-born Jews.
Pierrette was arrested on July 11, interrogated many times, then deported to Ravensbruck in August 1944. She was interned for a month before the Russians liberated the camp. It took her until May 1945 to return to France. Because of disease and lice in the Turgau Displaced Persons camp established by the Allies, her head had been shaved. Her hair had grown into spikes and she looked like 'a hedgehog'. Finally almost a year later she made it back to Lyon. One time on a tram, the passengers gave her dirty looks, snickering regarding her as a 'Tondu" the women who slept with the Germans and had their heads shaved at Liberation. Pierrette couldn't take it, stood and said in a loud voice for all 'I'm not what you think, I was in the Resistance and deported'.
Passengers apologized - one can imagine the shame and sheepishness in those who'd sat out the Occupation.
What an honor to spend time with Pierrette as she shared her experiences, her spirit and her smile.

.Cara - Tuesday

Garibaldi's Brazilian Wife: A Love Story

2013-05-13T00:00:00.000-04:00

We are honored to have distinguished author and tireless advocate for mystery writers everywhere, Annamaria Alfieri, as our guest blogger today. Her newest cannot-put-down-novel, BLOOD TANGO, launching on June 25th, takes place in Buenos Aires in 1945 and imagines the murder of an Evita Peron lookalike. Kirkus Reviews said Annamaria's Invisible Country, "compares with the notable novels of Charles Todd," and The Washington Post raved, "As both history and mystery, City of Silver glitters."

Welcome, Annamaria.

Ana María de Jesús da Silva was the daughter of Benito Rivero de Silva, a minor trader on the Brazilian coast of Santa Caterina. She was seventeen and betrothed to a wealthy landowner who was ten years older than her father.

Enter Giuseppe Garibaldi, a blond, blue-eyed, dashing Italian. (An aside for those who read Leighton’s August 8, 2011 post on this subject: yes, Garibaldi was born in Nice, which was French on the day of his birth, but had been Italian and would be again during his lifetime. One of Giuseppe’s beefs about governments, the one that made him a life-long republican, was the practice that kings and dukes could trade a plot of land and change the nationality of its citizens at will. He wanted Italy to be a Republic so that its citizens would always be Italians. And he saw to it that it became one. But that’s another story. Let’s get back to that Brazilian woman.)

Here are Garibaldi’s words about how he fell in love with Anita (the diminutive for Ana). Giuseppe was thirty-one at the time and fighting as a sea captain for the republican cause of Rio Grande do Sul in its attempt to separate from Brazil. A disastrous sea battle had drowned his companions, other exiled Italian republicans who had been fighting at his side.

“The loss of Luigi, Eduardo, and the others of my countrymen had left me utterly desolate. I felt quite alone in the world. Of all the friends who had made those desolate regions like home to me, no one was left….In short, I needed a human heart to love me—one that I could keep near me. I felt that, unless I found one immediately, existence would become intolerable.

“Pacing up and down the quarter-deck of the Itaparicia, wrapped in my own gloomy thoughts, I came, after trying every sort of argument, to the conclusion that I would seek for a woman so as escape from a weary and intolerable condition.

“By chance I cast my eyes toward the houses on the Barra, a tolerably high hill on the south side of the entrance to the lagoon, where a few simple and picturesque dwellings were visible. Outside one of these, by means of a telescope I usually carried with me on deck, I espied a young woman, and forthwith gave orders for the boat to be got out, as I wished to go ashore. I landed, and making for the houses where I expected to find the object of my excursion, I had just given up hope of seeing her again when I met an inhabitant of the place whose acquaintance I had made soon after my arrival.

“He invited me to take coffee in his house; we entered, and the first person who met my eyes was the damsel who had attracted me ashore. It was Anita…We both remained enraptured and silent like two people who met for the first time and seek in each other’s faces something which makes it easier to recall the forgotten past. . . At last I greeted her by saying, ‘Tu devi esser mea .’ (‘You have to be mine.’) I could speak but little Portuguese and uttered the bold words in Italian. Yet my insolence was magnetic, and I had formed a tie, pronounced a decree, which death alone could annul.”

Hot stuff, huh? I told you he was Italian!

Six weeks later, Anita stole out of her father’s house and rowed out to Garibaldi’s ship in the dark of night. They honeymooned onboard. She fought beside him in ensuing naval battles. When their ship was about to go down after an attack, he shot the dying, and she helped him torch the bark as they and the other survivors fled to shore.

After that defeat, they joined the republican land troops and fought in the jungle of interior Santa Caterina. When that province was lost to the young Brazilian emperor, Anita and Giuseppe went on to fight in Rio Grande do Sul. Pregnant with their first child, Anita remained behind the lines, but she took charge of the rebel army’s ammunition supply. While delivering munitions to the front, she found herself surrounded by the enemy and tried to flee on a horse. The animal was shot out from under her, and she was taken prisoner. But she managed to escape across a desert and rejoined Garibaldi eight days later.

Even after giving birth to her first child—Menotti, she found no peace. Hidden out in a farm house with Brazilian troops all around her, and half naked, she took her fifteen-day-old infant, leapt on horse, and escaped into the forest where she hid until Garibaldi came to rescue her.

That republican dream soon died when Rio Grande do Sul capitulated. Goncalves, its rebel leader, gave Anita and Giuseppe 900 head of cattle in thanks for their brave service. They drove the herd before them to Uruguay. They had been together for two years when they were married in Montevideo. There Garibaldi became a school teacher and in addition to Menotti , Anita bore him Rosita in 1843, Teresita in 1845, and Ricciotti in 1847.

There were four thousand Italian families in Montevideo at the time. When the city was put under siege by Rosas, the Argentine dictator, Garibaldi put together a force of Italians to help defend the city.

In 1848, Garibaldi took his red-shirted legionnaires back to fight in the Italian republican revolution, which he seems to have been born to lead. Anita and the children went with him, and she joined him in February 1849 in defending the ill-fated Roman Republic against a siege by Neopolitan and French armies. She was pregnant and battling a bout of malaria when Rome fell to the combined forces of French and Austrian occupiers. She fled with the Garabaldini and, at a farm near Ravenna, she died in Giuseppe’s arms on the 4^th of August.

Though Garibaldi went on to become a world-renowned hero, he loved Anita and revered her memory to the end. In 1860, like a victorious knight astride his horse (that she had taught him to ride), he went to hail for the first time Victor Emanuel II, King of united Italy. On that singular occasion, he wore his lady’s favor—Anita’s striped scarf—and the gray poncho of her South American heritage.

Annamaria for Leighton—Monday

Ethnic Dances

2013-05-12T01:05:00.003-04:00

Dear Murderous Ones,

I wrote this account in March 2009. In July 2009, deadly ethnic riots broke out in Urumqi, Xinjiang. 200 people died, at the least. There are many explanations for these demonstrations. I'm not sure what the truth of it all is, but I'll just say that, I wasn't surprised.

Xinjiang has long had the reputation of a place of exile - for Han Chinese, that is (I doubt this applies to, say, Xinjiang's Uighurs). A place to send troublemakers, people with inconvenient opinions, whose transgressions don't warrant imprisonment, but whom authorities prefer to isolate, keep out of the centers of power and opinion. Lin Zexu spent time in Xinjiang, and just a few days ago, AP spoke with He Weifang, well-known Beijing law professor and co-signer of Ch. 08, who was involuntarily transferred to an obscure Xinjiang college.

As places of exile go, Xinjiang, at least the part I visited, is pretty nice. He Weifang seems to agree: "I don't think it is a bad thing," he told AP. "It is quiet here. I get to read. I get to interact with fellow professors and students. It's a good thing."

My friend Susan, who is on a temporary assignment at a Xinjiang university, has found, I think to her own surprise, that she's liking Xinjiang a lot. I can see why. Yili, the Kazak Autonomous Region, is a beautiful area: grassland valleys, surrounded by snow-capped mountains. The air is clean, nature within easy reach; the food plentiful, fresh and tasty. The city itself is pretty ordinary: your basic Chinese frontier city, dusty, a hodgepodge of nondescript buildings in various shades of beige, with the occasional faux Roman columns to add a little...well, actually, I've never been sure what the whole faux Roman temple architecture in China was about. But there are surprises here: sudden, ornate Uighur homes, with carved pillars and eaves, an old Chinese temple transformed into a Muslim restaurant.

And, at the risk of dropping a big, ole' cliche...it's the people. I don't know when I've ever been welcomed more thoroughly and with such genuine warmth. You know those drinking nights out I mentioned? I know they have their obligatory aspect, but everyone seemed to be having...well, actual fun. Real friendship, or comradeship at least. I don't want to go into too much detail, because I was not there as a journalist or even an amateur blogger; I don't want to repeat overheard or shared conversations. But on my last memorable night out, at a Kazak restaurant (it involved, um, dancing as well as drinking), what I heard people say was, "we're friends here. Not just work friends. After we retire, we'll still be friends." Who knows if that will actually come to pass, but they meant it, at that moment.

My favorite exchange was with one of the University officials, who along with everyone else at the table urged me to return to Xinjiang and that my friends and family should come too, because they would be equally welcome. Susan and he proclaimed their friendship over baijiu (they'd bonded on a school sponsored trip to Kashgar), and Susan told him about our friendship.

"You and your family and friends are always welcome here," he said. "Because she is your friend. And I am her friend."

"Ah, I see," I said. "Therefore, I am your friend."

"Yes! It is mathematics!"

And he's a mathematician, so he should know.

I also really appreciated that he didn't pressure me into ganbei-ing baijiu (he was the one who suggested that I try it with garlic, to treat my cold). But I will admit, after I, uh, had to get up and dance with the Mongolian woman and she presented me with the ceremonial shot, I downed it. Rather neatly too. I think this sealed my friendship with the group.

I don't want to idealize Xinjiang; obviously I don't know it well at all, and there are serious problems there, particularly between the majority Uighurs and the incoming Hans: issues of ethnic and religious oppression and loss of cultural identity. The city where I stayed was the site of violent demonstrations in 1997; in the run-up to the Olympics, Chinese authorities supposedly thwarted a suicide bombing attempt on a China Southern Airlines flight in Xinjiang - I say "supposedly" because Uighur activists and some foreign observers accused China of exaggerating and fabricating such plots to justify a pre-Olympic crackdown on any potential dissent. Again, I am so far from expert that I hesitate to comment overmuch on these issues.

I will tell you what I saw.

The students - and the teachers - here don't encounter a lot of Western foreigners, so my coming was seen as an opportunity to meet a real, live American and get some English practice with a native speaker. I'd done this kind of thing thirty years ago, but this was one of the only places I'd been to in China recently where I was really a rarity, a novelty.

I loved the students. They were enthusiastic, sweet, a little shy but not so shy that it stopped them from asking questions, excited to have a foreign guest and to share their culture with me.

I went to their "English Corner." They'd arranged a presentation with me, all about Xinjiang, about the local foods and customs, and the particular cultures of Xinjiang's "ethnic minorities."

This was a mixed group of students. Most were Han, but there were Kazaks and Uighurs as well. Now, everyone seemed happy and excited to participate. But...the MCs, the kids doing the explanations and introductions, were Han. "And now this Kazak girl will show us the Kazak dancing!" The Kazak girl did, with a big smile. A Uighur couple did a traditional dance, acting out the roles, having fun with it. All the performers were really good - I learned later that they were either enrolled in the arts school at the University or were at members of the dance club or the music club. Then, a young Kazak man played a song on the dombra, the Central Asian lute. He was dressed head to toe in black, his hair spiked like an early 80s punk, his collar turned up. He played with fierce concentration. No pro-forma smiles here. When he finished, he made a little, abrupt bow, stone-faced, and left shortly after. Elvis has left the building, I thought.

It was just a little strange, hearing these Han kids talk excitedly about the quaint local customs, introducing the "ethnic minorities" to perform in front of me.

There was one particular Uighur girl there, outgoing, a live wire, wearing a sweater with some slogan spelled out in sequins, I forget what it was. Regardless, she sparkled. After an explanation from the MCs about several aspects of Uighur culture, she stood up and explained things from the perspective of an actual Uighur. "This is why we make the chuanr on iron and not wood." "This is why we eat this dish with our hands." She laughed a lot, seemed to be close to many of the other, Han students. But she was not shy or apologetic about explaining her own culture in front of them.

When it came time for questions, she stood right up. Her first question I couldn't exactly understand. It had something to do with how young Europeans were portrayed in films and television that she'd seen. The gist of her question was, were they really as sexually active as they appeared? Did they kiss and do such things on busses, in public?

Perhaps, I said, it's true that Europeans are more sexually active at a younger age than most Chinese, but I am not an expert. Perhaps they are more demonstrative in public as well. But different European countries have different cultural norms in this area. And of course, films and television tend to exaggerate.

Her second question: "Is it always true that the more powerful people in a country will always cover up the less powerful? Will the less powerful always lose their culture? How do you solve this problem?"

I paraphrase, but this was the gist.

The other kids in the class reacted, but I wouldn't say they overreacted. No one passed out in astonishment; I didn't get the sense that anyone was running out to inform the local Party representative (though who knows, really?). Still, I was impressed by her fearlessness. There's no more loaded an issue in China than anything smacking of "splittism."

As a member of the majority culture in my own country, what could I say? Well, that, to start. I'm in the Han position, you know?

And: "It's a very difficult problem. And it's really up to you and your children, how much you can preserve your culture, what's really important to you." I couldn't say, "too bad the Chinese government doesn't support an official bilingual policy, so if you have to learn Mandarin to advance in education and government and business, maybe the Han should have to learn Uighur or Kazak too." I don't know, maybe I could have said that, but I didn't think of it then. The whole issue of whether Xinjiang was "Chinese" or whether it should be something else, East Turkistan, maybe, well, I wasn't going to get into that.

What I did think of to say was this: "You know, it goes both ways. In America, African Americans are a minority, but African Americans' contributions to culture are so significant that African American culture really is a huge part American culture - all Americans' culture." I talked about Chinese people in California - "that cultural influence is a part of our larger culture as well. Maybe here in Xinjiang, it's a little similar. Maybe Han people are also influenced by Uighur culture and by Kazak culture - maybe you are creating a new culture, that is a blend of all the people here."

I think it's true, from the people I've met. The Han cab drivers, with their Uighur accents, the love of the food and the land, the way they socialize and drink and dance - it's different there. China, but not China. Chinese but not Chinese.

But is this enough? Enough for Xinjiang's Uighurs and Kazaks?

I have no way of knowing.

Lisa -- Sunday...

On Tinos the Greek Spirit Reigns Supreme

2013-05-11T00:00:00.000-04:00

My buddy called me at 11AM and asked, “What are you doing.” From experience I knew that meant only one thing: he was about to tempt me with some wild-ass distraction. So, I laid it on heavy.

“I’m swamped. I’m in the midst of working on an essay I promised to contribute to a ‘how to’ book on developing characters, under a deadline to get back to my publisher with ARC corrections on my new book coming out in September, immersed in preparing an outline for the month-long writing course I promised my alma mater I’d teach in January, and I’m trying to finish the 6^th Kaldis book before the end of the summer.”

“Good, you’re not busy. We’re leaving in two hours on the ferry for Tinos. We’re invited to a panegyri which means you’re invited, too.”

And that, my friends, is how the ruination of all good intentions begins.

He knew I couldn’t resist. I hadn’t been back to Tinos since August. A less than thirty-minute ferry ride from Mykonos brings you to an entirely different world. I’ve written about that Cylcadic island before (for Novel Adventures), and of course, it served as the venue for my 4^th Andreas Kaldis adventure, Target: Tinos.

"A" marks the spot of the panegyri

Most who know of Tinos do so because of its Church of the Annunciation, Panagia Evangelistria, the most revered religious shrine in Greece where more than a million pilgrims flock into Tinos’ harbor town each year, many seeking healing from its famed Miraculous Icon of the Virgin Mary.

For me, though, it’s greatest attraction lay elsewhere: Fifty villages as quiet and undisturbed as a dreamer’s quaint fantasy of Greece; brilliant vistas at every turn; a meandering two-hundred-mile network of cobblestone trails and old farm paths running from hillside to hillside and dipping into valleys in between; and a history of fabled marble quarries and artisans linked to some of Greece’s greatest artistic achievements.

How could I resist returning there in glorious springtime? And, so, of course, I caved.

The hosting church of the panegyri

Technically, a panegyri is a party celebrating the name day of a Greek Orthodox saint, but in this instance the party was thrown by a Catholic church. Unlike predominantly Orthodox Greece, Tinos has a substantial Catholic population with roughly one half of its formal churches Catholic, and whether this celebration was tied into the fortieth day after Catholic Easter or something else, I do not know. What I do know is that from the moment we arrived in the tiny village of Kechros I felt I was home; and I’d never been there before.

Kechros is an inland agricultural community well east of the island’s dominating Mount Xobourgo—a soaring granite height, faced with sheer cliffs on three sides, due north of the port, and to which since pre-historic times the island’s inhabitants flocked for protection from all sorts of invaders.

Mt. Xobourgo

An on and off again misting rain sent more villagers (and visitors) inside than usual but the faces were all sunshine. It was the sort of experience which reveals the bedrock Greek trait that keeps drawing me back to their land: No matter what stresses are playing upon their souls, the Greeks’ innate sense of finding time to share in celebrating the simple joys of life reigns supreme. Nothing typifies that spirit more than an island panegyri, where all are welcome and rarely must one pay.

In a Tinos mountain village you might not find a pharmacy or supermarket, but there will be a welcoming smile as sweet as the island’s honey, and a likely winking eye for one who cannot resist snatching a lemon from a tree or an artichoke from it’s perch.

I enjoyed my afternoon journey into a different time, but it ended far too quickly and by evening I was back on the ferry returning to Mykonos. There is so much to experience on Tinos, and each time I travel there I find a new reason to return. This time I found one again…the opening of a new local brewery. We bumped into the owner and she invited us.

Did I forget to say how very friendly are the people? There’s a lot to learn from those who appreciate the simple pleasures of friendship, community celebration…and artichokes.

Whoops, must run. The brewery opens tonight.

Jeff—Saturday

The Official Monster Raving Loony Party

2013-05-10T00:30:00.000-04:00

In a perfect world politics would be banned as they get in the way of important stuff. I don't think we should have politicians, it just encourages a dangerous form of lunacy. In ancient times, in the Greek city states (the Polis) members of the society were picked at random to run the country for a year or so ( a bit like jury duty). That seemed to work fine. Jeff will know more about this!

Mr Farage - The political everyman

Last week there were local elections in England and the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) did very well, promising that now they 'will trigger a political "earthquake" in next year's European parliamentary elections.' That quote is from its charismatic leader, Nigel Farage - a pleasant faced man with a great sense of humour. Were these the votes of disgruntled Tories? A protest vote of the austerity policies that are being proposed?

I think at the moment there is a bit of a stand off as the UKIP leader is refusing to negotiate with the PM after Cameron called his party "fruitcakes".

Maybe if you are going to be a politician, you may as well make your lunacy official- then at least the voter knows! When mooching around, I found a copy of the Monster Raving Loony Party's manifesto. Strangely enough they were sponsored by William Hill the bookmakers in the last general election ...

"We believe that parties like the Loony Party are an essential part of British democracy and eccentricity; and that the world would be a poorer place if there was no room in politics for a little harmless levity," said William Hill.

looks like a good party to be a member of!

The Official Monster Raving Loony Party was established in 1983 by musician and politician David Sutch (1940–1999), better known as "Screaming Lord Sutch, 3rd Earl of Harrow". It really existed just to satirise British politics which is a habit of the Oxbridge comedy genre. In the history of British comedy there has been a constancy of similar concepts, notably the Election Night Special sketch on Monty Python's Flying Circus in which the Silly, Sensible, and Slightly Silly parties stand against each other. One candidate is called Tarquin Fin Tim Lin Bin Whin Bim Lim bus stop f'tang ftang Ole Biscuit barrel. A sketch I know so well I can almost quote it off by heart. ('Well this is largely as I predicted except that the silly party won. I think this is largely due to the number of votes cast.') What a sad confession is that!

There was another one by The Goodies where Graeme Garden stood for Parliament as the Science Loony.

Here are some highlights from their manifesto which is made up by suggestions from Joe Public;-

To stop young people's excessive drinking and having a good time the politicians should convert all their 40 bars at Westminster into Milk Bars. Their restaurants should be converted into salad bars to show solidarity with the school children that they encourage to improve health and fitness.

All politicians should be made to stand continually on one leg while making speeches to check how

balanced their arguments are. It should also reduce political flatulence and soothe the listeners' ears.

If you want your kids to be less fat, feed them less.

Make weeding an Olympic sport .

The party should adopt the paint it purple policy (PIPP). In areas of unemployment ,youth unemployment and disaffectation every third building in the country should be painted purple.

All newly trained dentists will be required to have three teeth removed, two fillings and root canal work done without anaethestic. So they will know the agony they inflict on the rest of us.

Follow the leader is a pastime that has been cast aside by society today and we think it should become an extreme event in the Olympics.

The national symbol of England should change from three lions to three badgers. as we never see lions running around in England. The English should take pride in their lack of interesting, wild animals !

The new English Emblem..cutesville!

All mixed sweets like revels and smarties should come in a clear wrapper so you know the next flavour you are getting and so that you can remove your favourites from the bag before you offer them to anybody else.

Neds - non educated delinquents

Yobs and delinquent youths, seem to like ASBOs- anti social behaviour orders- they treat them like a badge of honour. Instead they should be called magic pink fluffy bunny awards. No-one not even a ned (non educated delinquent) would want that. They might also be required to wear a pink fluffy bunny ears and a badge saying 'I love the magic pink fluffy bunny...'

It is proposed that pets especially dogs and cats may not be dressed in miniature human clothing for the purpose of human amusement.

Every day the news should tell people an interesting fact in the hope of increasing people's knowledge. Like the fact the black box flight recorder is yellow.

We will instruct the RSPCA to ensure that all meerkats come in twos to enable the public to effectively compare the meerkat.

Saving fuel? A bungy rope should be attached to all vehicles making a journey. no fuel would be needed for the return journey.

All terrorists should wear bells and whistles so that we know where they are.

Pokemon should be considered an endangered species.

Put all people convicted of anti social behaviour into stocks, this will create a demand for stocks and this will help the stock market.

Superglue unruly teenagers together, as the saying goes, if you can't beat them, join them.

It is proposed that the European union end its discrimination by creating a court of human lefts because their present policy is one sided.

It should be illegal for all super heroes to use their powers for evil.

Anyone allowing their hyena to poop on the pavement should shovel it away immediately, as this is no laughing matter.

Health and safety; We propose to ban self responsibility on the grounds that it is bad for your health.

Issues with the European constitution will be sorted out by going for a long walk. Everybody knows that walking is good for the constitution.

We will ban all forms of greyhound racing. This will help stop the country going to the dogs.

If you have ever seen the British Parliament sitting, then you see that there is some sense in all this.

Caro Britain 10/05/13

Mahatma Gandhi in South Africa

2013-05-09T12:34:00.000-04:00

Gandhi is an iconic figure for the world, not only for his leadership in India’s struggle to achieve independence from Britain, but also as the originator of Satyagraha, the strategy of passive resistance. Perhaps less well known is that his early career and the events that shaped his life and philosophy took place in South Africa. He is a hero of the resistance movement in South Africa also and his policy of Satyagraha or passive resistance was born here.

Gandhi grew up a shy and retiring figure in India in Gujarat in the late nineteenth century. Although not a brilliant scholar, he qualified to study law in England and returned to India in 1891. At that point his concern was to build a successful law practice and, in due course, to succeed his father as the chief minister of a small principality. But his nature was not conducive to a one man law practice and he accepted a position with a law firm with an opening in South Africa in the state of Natal on the east coast. Accepting that position may have been the turning point of his life.

Gandhi found himself working for successful Muslim traders; the Hindus in South Africa were the laborers in the sugar cane fields. Gandhi had no problem with his new clients, but felt that there was an “Indianess” that transcended religion and caste.

Almost immediately he found himself the recipient of racial discrimination wherever he went. Although he had a valid ticket, he was removed from the first class carriage of a train to Johannesburg because another passenger objected to sharing the carriage “with a coolie.” Several hotels refused to accommodate him. Racism was alive and well in South Africa fifty years before the National Party government made it compulsory!

The very success of their merchant activities made his clients the recipients of restrictive laws. Gandhi extended his original stay in South Africa to help the local Indians oppose a law which denied them the right to vote. In 1894 he was involved in founding the Natal Indian Congress – a movement designed to align Indian people to oppose discriminatory laws.

During the South African (Boer) war, Gandhi supported the English and organized Indian ambulance drivers and even a small contingent of Indians to participate. But once the war was over, the Indians were to get small thanks for these initiatives.

In 1906 a law was proposed in the Transvaal that required Indian and Chinese people to register and carry identification documents at all times. Gandhi chaired a meeting of around 3,000 people at the old Empire Theater in Johannesburg. Some demanded retaliation to resist and oppose the law, but Gandhi outlined a policy of Satyagraha or passive resistance. If all else failed, Indians would go to jail rather than follow the prescripts of the new law.

Gandhi is quoted as saying: "Up to the year 1906 I simply relied on appeal to reason. I was a very industrious reformer ... But I found that reason failed to produce an impression when the critical moment arrived in South Africa.

"My people were excited - even a worm can and does turn - and there was talk of wreaking vengeance. I had then to choose between allying myself to violence or finding out some other method of meeting the crisis and stopping the rot, and it came to me that we should refuse to obey legislation that was degrading and let them put us in jail if they liked. Thus came into being the moral equivalent of war."

Over the next seven years the policy was put into practice. There were large, peaceful demonstrations, burning of registration cards, and strikes. Thousands of Indians were arrested, fired from their jobs, and beaten. But public sympathy in South Africa and Britain eventually forced the Smuts government to come to a compromise with the protesters.

When Gandhi returned to India permanently in 1915, he was an eminent leader and practitioner of “the moral equivalent of war”. He left behind a philosophy adopted by the newly formed African National Congress. The ANC held to that policy until 1960 when they switched to a policy of armed resistance. By that time India had been an independent nation for nearly fifteen years.

Michael – Thursday.

Crime - flat packaging

2013-05-08T17:02:00.000-04:00

Crime in Iceland is blissfully not spectacular. There are not enough people here for real badness to fester; although there is of course the occasional bleep on the radar.

This week one of the biggest story on the news is a longstanding IKEA scam that has been ongoing for at least five years and involved a group of at least five people. The set-up and the organizing is a bit elaborate for the gains involved but I guess to each his own.

The plan was such: go into IKEA, find something in a box that is cheap, strip off the long white strip with the name of the product and the barcode and place it over the same white strip of a more expensive product. Go pay for the altered box and viola, you now have an IKEA product that cost you just a fraction of the real price. But the plan did not stop there. The next step in the plan involved removing the strip with the cheaper price and taking the box back to IKEA and returning the product, now for the real price.

At IKEA you cannot get your money back unless you can provide them with the receipt of purchase. They will however provide you with a credit note that you can use for future purchases if you do not have it. So this is what this gang ended up with. Endless credit notes for IKEA.

Apparently over the years they used the credit to buy gift cards to give for presents and to shop in the grocery section for food. I do not know how familiar you are with the food selection at IKEA stores but we are not talking about an anxiety attack brought on by an overwhelming number of choices. To sum it up approximately we are talking about pickled herring, crisp bread and of course meatballs. The switcheroo took place from a couple per month to dozens per month – for at least five years. That amounts to a lot of meatballs.

There are hungry people and poor that one would understand would take such measures to get by or to better their life. Not many live in Iceland though, we have a social system that is supposed to catch you if you fall and keep those down and out from having to rob IKEA.

But the people involved in the IKEA robbery were professionals, all of whom were employed. The ring leader is a lawyer, one guy is said to be a government official and one of the women a nurse. Strange hobby if there ever was one.

And how were they apprehended? Turns out that IKEA had a new chair that was so unpopular with the clientele due to its high price that they did not sell a single one. But the inventory system showed that miraculously four had been returned. And when checked all four had been returned by the same guy. More checking showed a return pattern that called for a full-fledged investigation into the matter which eventually uncovered the whole scam.

Good news is that when all of this is taken together IKEA has announced that almost all of the depreciation in their stocks in the years involved has been explained away.

Yrsa - Wednesday

Special Report from Michael and Stanley: Malice Domestic

2013-05-05T09:57:00.001-04:00

We spent the weekend at Malice Domestic – the mystery book convention that leans towards cozies - that takes place at the beginning of May in Bethesda. It’s a great convention, much smaller than Bouchercon which gives it the sort of intimacy that you also find across the water at Crimefest in Bristol at the end of the month. Here are a few impressions of Malice 2013 – the twenty-fifth anniversary event.

It started with a bang with Malice Go Round – sort of speed dating with authors. It takes place in a big venue with 20 round tables seating ten people each. Authors pair up –two per table – and they have two minutes each to introduce themselves and pitch their books. There is a thirty second warning and then the authors move to the next higher numbered table, giving the readers a few seconds to make notes before the next pair of authors settles and starts dishing out hand-outs, bookmarks, cards and the like. The volume rises as the authors talk louder to make themselves heard over the other authors who have started talking louder for the same reason. It takes one and a half hours!

Michael using his two minutes at Malice Go Round

Malice Go Round sounds nightmarish, but it’s actually good fun. The readers have a chance to meet forty authors face to face for a couple of minutes, long enough to decide if they would like to follow up by going to that author’s panel discussion or taking a look at the author’s book in the bookroom. And for authors, how often do you have the chance to pitch a book directly to 160 mystery book readers? Admittedly, we had a big advantage: since there are two of us, we could take turns pitching Kubu and DEADLY HARVEST. We were tired at the end of Malice Go Round; the other authors must have been exhausted!

Then there were the usual panels of four authors being put through their paces on some topic or other of mystery interest. Also in depth discussions with the guests of honor and honorees:

Laura Lippman – Guest of Honor - with the Agatha teacup

Peter Robinson – International Guest of Honor

Aaron Elkins – Life Time Achievement Award

Carolyn Hart – Amelia Award

The highlight was the Agatha Award Banquet, a very posh affair with Laura Lippman doing an excellent job as toastmaster. Harper invited us to join Peter Robinson’s table. In addition to Peter and his wife we had the company of Harper editors and authors to enjoy, including Caroline Todd, one half of the Charles Todd writing team, who was up for Best Historical Mystery.

A little mellowed by food and wine, we awaited the announcement of the Agatha Awards.

And the winners were:

Best Children’s/Young Adult Novel

The Code Busters Club, Case #2: The Haunted Lighthouse, by Penny Warner

Best Short Story

Mischief in Mesopotamia, by Dana Cameron (Dana was so overwhelmed by the award that she momentarily forgot her husband’s name when it came time to thank him!)

Best Nonfiction

Books to die for: The World’s Greatest Mystery Writers on the World’s Greatest Mystery Novels, by John Connolly and Declan Burke

Best Historical Mystery

Danny Gilver and an Unsuitable Day for Murder, by Catriona McPherson

Best First Novel

Low Country Boil, by Susan M. Boyer

Best Novel

The Beautiful Mystery, by Louise Penny.

A good time was had by all and the winners and losers adjourned to the bar for a celebratory or congratulatory drink!

Michael & Stanley – Monday.

The Train! The Train!

2013-05-05T01:47:00.004-04:00

I have an arm injury that makes driving uncomfortable (Also typing, thus my photo-heavy posts as of late). So, when I needed to go to the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books recently, I took the new Exposition Line from my friend's house to get there.

What a revelation! Instead of fighting traffic and searching for expensive parking, I rode in a shiny new light rail that dropped me off at the USC campus for $1.50. It was a wonderful way to experience Los Angeles. I lived in LA for over 25 years, and I keep thinking about what a huge difference having an actual transit system like this would make for the city. Suddenly it feels more accessible. More tied-together.

To get back to San Francisco, I took Amtrak's Coast Starlight train.

Amtrak gets a bad rap, which I feel is not entirely fair. Okay, not fair at all. The problem with Amtrak is that as a country, we do not fund it adequately. We subsidize driving in all kinds of ways, but the idea of a national rail system sends some people into screaming fits about socialism. I've ridden a lot of trains in other countries, and it's absurd to me that the US doesn't take more pride into supporting and expanding rail. There's no better way to get from city to city, and no better way to actually see a country than to ride its trains.

The Coast Starlight is a spectacular ride. Once you head north out of Los Angeles, the route hugs the coast, at times so close to the ocean that it feels like you can dangle your feet in the waves:

The route roughly parallels the 101, so after a time you head inland, through the Middle Kingdom around Paso Robles and San Luis Obispo:

Past San Luis Obispo, you experience some of California's agricultural and industrial heartland:

You get to experience all this sitting in comfortable coach seats (way more room than the cattle car ambiance of most air trips these days) or hanging out in the observation car, where strangers will ask you if you want to share their bottle of wine, or in the dining car, where you get to eat decent meals with real silverware. If you're lucky enough to travel first class, you have your own compartment (I'm doing this, I swear).

You ride the train, you can read a book. Take a nap. Stroll to the observation car. Visit the snack car, where the Amtrak worker announces over the PA that "there's pizza and beer, come on down!"
If you choose to eat in the dining car, you share a table with other travelers. This can be a mixed experience. But it's never boring.

During lunch, one of my table mates said something that I found pretty profound:

"Other forms of travel take time. This gives you time."

She was so right.

Lisa -- Sunday...

The Kardashians Are Coming!

2013-05-04T00:00:00.000-04:00

You’d think that with this being my first post since arriving back on Mykonos I could come up with a catchier title. But if you have to ask why that title you’re obviously not keeping up with our world’s major news events. For weeks now my inbox has been filled with Google Alerts for “Mykonos” linked to a public relations blitzkrieg hyping the “secret” invasion and occupation of Mykonos by the Kardashian Klan for the purpose of filming this season’s opening episode of their addictive (so I hear) American TV show, Keeping Up With the Kardashians.

It appears that momma Kris and her Kardashian brood—Kourtney, Kim, Khloe, Kyle, Kendall, and Rob (now deceased first husband Robert’s contribution to the naming process)—plus kids from the first marriage of her kurrent husband, 1976 Olympic Decathlon champion Bruce Jenner, all kame to Mykonos as part of the last big breakout before very pregnant daughter Kim has her baby next month.

If you believed even a bit of all the press hype, the Kardashians had come to save the island, bringing their celebrity and cash to a struggling land somehow overlooked by CARE. I’d reluctantly left the US in its time of crisis—the seventeen-year cicada onslaught—but now would stand shoulder to shoulder with my Mykonian brethren in facing their own.

Thanks to my friend, Nick Desavvi, for the photos

But I’d forgotten something: Mykonians were used to invaders. Carians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Minoans, Ionians, Athenians, Macedonians, Romans, Venetians, Turks, Russians, and Germans all dominated Mykonos at some point. So, more “ians” invading was no big deal.

The Mayor of Mykonos in the middle

The mayor courteously welcomed them to the island, the people smiled and made them feel important, the weather and sea accommodated them. No one told them that the two villas they’d obtained were only five hundred yards from the municipal sewage treatment plant and three houses away from the scene of the murder that inspired the opening of my new book (more on that later), that breaking plates in restaurants was déclassé, or that they'd arrived a month too early for the island's fabled nightlife action. The Mykonian people allowed them to enjoy their holiday and live out their fantasy—even one as big as saving an island.

The Mykonians behaved precisely as they do with all visitors: as the most hospitable people on earth. And the Kardashians will undoubtedly return, albeit truly in secret (as some of their crew has before).

Frankly, it’s easy to take cheap shots at the Kardashian phenomenon. After all, the most celebrated accomplishments of the family before the launch of their reality show were daughter Kim’s time as a stylist and personal shopper for Lindsay Lohan (an unreal living reality in her own right) and her leaked homemade sex video with rapper Ray J, though she’s since had a 72-day marriage to NBA player Kris Humphries and is currently pregnant at the hands of her ex(?)-boyfriend, rapper Kanye West.

BUT, let’s keep something in mind: These folks are PR geniuses. And I admire them for that. Their show alone has brought them more than a hundred million dollars and they’ve branched into fashion and cosmetics. And in connection with that leaked video, Kim received a reported five million dollar settlement. By the way, Kim has more than 8,000,000 twitter followers. Yes, EIGHT MILLION.

Which reminds me. In case you’re reading this, Kim, I’d sincerely appreciate it if you could tweet to your followers that Poisoned Pen Press just surprised me by putting my first Andreas Kaldis mystery, MURDER IN MYKONOS, on sale this week in e-book format for $0.99 on Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Kobu, PLUS they’re rolling out a brand new cover design for my entire series. The new covers are not yet up on bookseller sites, but it’s a variation on the cover for my new book in the series (#5), MYKONOS AFTER MIDNIGHT, coming in September. What do you think of the cover, Kim? I love it for one very obvious Kardashian-like reason☺. One’s never too old to learn from the masters.

By the way, tomorrow is Greek Orthodox Easter, a wonderful time that I’ve written about before. It represents all the very best of Greek family life and values. And the Kardashians have left the island for Santorini.

Kalo Paska, my friends.

Jeff—Saturday

Getting the Needle in Birmingham

2013-05-03T00:30:00.000-04:00

Just spent the weekend in Birmingham, not the first place in the world that would be associated with acupuncture but as a venue for a conference it was interesting. Birmingham Midlands UK this is.

(shiny Birmingham)

Not Birmingham Alabama.

(a warm version of Birmingham)

Birmingham is famous for three things at least. Because I am about to list four.

Having more canals than Venice

Fabulous curry houses

is your mouth watering yet?

or yet?

Cadburys chocolate.

Now?

And this guy - Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra.

The other thing (five!) is the Bullring which has this famous statue. Every time we walked past it, it had some drunk on top of it, under it, round it, sitting on its head. It has a lot to put up with. Scale wise, it's about four and a half meters long, made of solid bronze, weighs six and a half tonnes and still has to be nailed down.

The Bull Ring is the major commercial area of Birmingham, important to the local economy since the Middle Ages when the first market was held. The first shopping centre was built here in the 1960s. Then another was built with more security and higher end shops and was renamed the Bullring - one word. I was surprised that it has such a collection of designer shops, jewellers and watch shops in a city that I would not have said was rolling in wealth. I saw a ten thousand pound mobile phone. I mean, why?

I read that the Bullring is built in a sandstone ridge that drops 15 metres from New Street to St Martins Church. I think that's why we kept getting confused ... going in on the ground floor, up two escalators and still coming out on the ground floor. It has about 40 million visitors per annum.

Brummies, as the locals are known, have a strange accent. An associate of mine is a professor in something useless ... HR, or marketing, or advertising or some rubbish like that. He told me that he had done a lot of research into trusted accents for call centre location. Scottish accents (Sean Connery) and the Newcastle accent (Cheryl Cole) are the most trusted accents for two reasons - they are classless and perceived to be friendly because they have an automatic Australian inflection. That wee uplift at the end of a sentence that psychologically invites a response.

The conference was organised by the British Medical Acupuncture Society who are summed up by this statement.

" Acupuncture probably originated in China, where it is used as one of a range of treatments provided within Traditional Chinese Medicine. Traditional Chinese Medicine is often called TCM. Although TCM is taught in medical schools in China, TCM doctors have a very different way of looking at how the human body works. The TCM idea of disease and symptoms is hard to reconcile with knowledge from modern medicine. You should note that China also trains large numbers of conventional medical doctors. It is a myth to believe that TCM is the only treatment available for the billions of people who live in modern day China. In fact, the Chinese seem to live with a mixture of both TCM and modern medicine.

Many Western doctors accept that acupuncture treatment does work in a wide range of conditions and for a variety of patients. We want to use this treatment to help our patients. However, our modern medical knowledge makes it very hard for Western doctors to accept the principles of TCM - which to many Western doctors do not fit with their understanding of how the body works."

One of the most interesting lectures was by a western doctor and acupuncturist who had studied extensively in China exploring the cultural differences of medicine over time.

There is 'truth decay' of medicine- i.e. basically all medical knowledge has a half life, usually about thirty years. Fifty per cent of what a doctor was taught thirty years ago is now untrue. In the fields of immunology and liver science, the half life is seven or eight years. So it's interesting to see how the language of China three thousand years ago is interpreted by us who do westernised acupuncture. Just look at this picture, she is all we aspire to in western society, young, slim, fit, healthy and ....re hydrating.

Our ancient Chinese counterparts would see her as a TB victim - big sweats, weight loss, thirst etc. If we sneeze we have the cold. If a terracotta warrior sneezed he would have the plague and no friends. A book written in the plague times of 1643 is still being used as a text book for TCM today so you can see how that might not work - or does it?

Practitioners of traditional Chinese acupuncture might never question that the population of old China was a very different population to ours. Many conditions are prescribed boiled food and eat nothing fresh. That's because the soil contamination was so bad they needed to boil to kill the bugs. Nowadays we do not eat enough fresh/raw food.

It's a case of 'junk and gems together'. There are historical, linguistic issues and the perception of illness itself can be problematic. Two big drug companies noticed that their worldwide anti depressants were not selling in Japan, because Japanese do not consider depression an illness. The direct translation might be stagnation ... a time for personal reflection, a time for growth to a better character. But not an 'illness' as such.

Chinese today still complain of running piglet disease (inguinal hernia) and a thing called stuffy chest - translated as that feeling in your chest just before a thunderstorm. But then we talk about butterflies in our stomach and everybody knows what we mean. Another favourite symptom is weak back and knees....at first glance it sounds weird but then ... does it sound like that feeling before you decide to sit down and have a cuppa? Because the Chinese have no history of psychology, their own 'psychology' is reflected on the body, not on the mind. Stressed and depressed? They do yoga, tai chi. We take Prozac until it ceases to work proving that they might be short term treatments. In the long term depressed patients are prescribed more exercise... tai chi and yoga come to mind.

Think of post traumatic stress disorder/ shellshock /hysterical paralysis or the awful phrase - low moral fibre. All these terms have been used in wartime in Britain over the last 100 years and the diagnosis of 'low moral fibre' is more recent than you might suppose.

After the 2004 tsunami American psychologists and councillors flew out to help with the PTSD in Sri Lanka only to find that there wasn't any. The locals were busy rebuilding their huts and their lives, they mourned loved ones and the loss of a society but the devastation meant they had to 'act'. And that makes sense to me - a huge trauma, then a kinship, a feeling of in this boat together, physically being busy and useful ... needed and wanted. A sense of belonging. It reminded me of the three people I know with PTSD from war time, they all complain of feeling useless. But they were all removed from their bigger society, the army, and brought back to a society where nobody can understand what they have been through, knowing that the army has no use for them in the short or long term.

But maybe there is no difference at all in the culture of medicine, just the same thing from a different perspective. The disease Koro is a shrinking of one part of the male anatomy that they do not want to shrink. If westerners do not suffer from that then why is all spam about Viagra? But Koro is so prevalent in some African societies it has now been identified as a possible "cultural relative" of body dysmorphic disorder.

Do you think that ten grand mobile phone has an app that cures such shrinkage? Or if you can afford a phone at ten grand maybe the shrinkage does not matter! :)

Caro GB 03 05 2013

Flying again!

2013-05-02T14:30:00.001-04:00

We have just started our book touring for DEADLY HARVEST. Last night we had a terrific event at the Ivy Bookstore in Baltimore and tomorrow we have a weekend of Malice in Bethesda.

What a tour usually means, of course, is getting onto a plane and flying. My flight from Minneapolis to Baltimore took me via Atlanta (to save money, of course - and to get more frequent flyer miles). With all that time in the air, I pulled out the SkyMall magazine to see what is currently hot for consumers. It was on a similar flight a year ago that I discovered SkyMall magazine and blogged about what it had to offer your pet dogs (Airplane Reading).

This time I paid more attention to what it could do for me.

As an aside, what always strikes me when I return to the States is how fear-driven television advertising is. Most adverts seem to focus on fear of aging, fear of impotence, fear of being dirty, fear of being sick, and so on. In an obscure way, I find quite appealing adverts for medication that spend about 90% of the allotted time listing the potential side-effects, many of which are far worse than the ailment the medication is intended to treat.

So it came as a big surprise that the cover of SkyMall offered a Jorg Gray diver's watch with Swiss RONDA movement. The surprise was that it trumpeted that it was "water-resistant" to 200 metres (about 650 feet) and had no disclaimer that diving to that depth almost certainly would result in death unless you were in a bathysphere, in which case your watch wouldn't get wet. I sat back for a few

minutes, while nibbling the few peanuts that trickled out of the minute packet I was offered for lunch, wondering why Jorg Gray would ever want to know if the watch was resistant to such great pressures given that you can't dive to that depth. And how would he check anyway? Hire a boat and a long fishing line and dangle the watch into the depths? And how would he know when it was 200 metres deep? He'd have to also dangle a depth meter. Then how would he read that meter?

As you can see, this idle speculation can take you into interesting places and certainly helps pass the time.

But not enough time, unfortunately, so I had to continue reading SkyMall.

The first advert directed at improving one's life was for a pill called Lipidryl. To quote: "This super compound may have produced more impressive weight loss results than any other substance ever tested."

That is a strong claim, so the scientist in me read further. The scientific reference was to an article "Ngondi JL, Matsinkou R, Oben JE. The use of Irvingia gabonensus extract (IGOB131) in the management of metabolic syndrome in Cameroon." In parentheses at the end of the citation was a note that this was submitted to the journal Nutrition in 2008. Submitted, not publish. Hmmmm. Then there was the caveat at the bottom "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease."

Is Lipidryl for me? I don't think so.

Next was the hand-held ECG Monitor to spot check for cardiac arrhythmias on the golf course - "for those uncertain times when you're not quite sure what's going on." Spend $229.99 for a device for my unlikely hole-in-one (I've never had one!) or, as my friends would snidely say, that would run out of batteries through constant use? I decided to pass on this one too.

Then I read about Sani Squares Multi-Pack to safeguard against germs on the road. "Whether you need to change clothes in an airport restroom or are ready to take a comfortable nap on a flight, Sani Squares quickly and efficiently create a personal barrier from germs, bacteria or fluids left behind." I may consider buying this. I am not so worried about the germs and bacteria, but if it will let me take a comfortable nap on a plane, it would be worth five times the $12.99 price.

I am running out of space here, but I was struck by the number of items you can strap to your body. If you put them all on at the same time, you would be ideally suited to being the protagonist in a horror movie.

For maximum benefit, you would have to start with the Magic-Benefit Panty (if you are female) or the Bottoms Up Boxer Brief (for males). The former enhances a woman's bottom naturally and has ultra-flat seams for the invisible look, and the latter is designed to lift a man's rear without padding. Both have removable padding for you to adjust to your preferred contour.

Then to prevent slouching and stress you can buy the Straighten Up Posture Corrector - it "retrains, realigns and relaxes the wearer to avoid slouching, hunching and stress. In my circle of friends, wearing one of these would cause you to be the butt of many jokes.

If you are still in the dating scene, taking off all of these accoutrements in front of a new date could give rise to a situation in which the above-mentioned portable ECG monitor would actually be useful.

And if you are indeed stressed, you can put on the SomaWave Helmet, a space-age looking device that will send you into a state of euphoria. "It's like having thousands of tiny fingers stimulate your scalp!" But please don't use it while operating heavy machinery because the helmet may produce trance-like states of consciousness.

I'm getting sleepy just thinking of the SomaWave Helmet, so I will read about the anti-aging formulas, the natural relief from sinus congestions and allergies, and the compression products from Instaslim some other time.

However, I'm almost tempted to read about Toppik before I go to bed. To apply it you "simply shake the fibers over any thinning area (on your head)." When you do this, thousands of color matched hair fibers instantly blend with your existing hair. "'Magnetized' with static electricity, they bond so securely that they will stay in place day and night even in wind, rain, or perspiration." It's only $21.95, but it is not clear whether it comes with a salt shaker.

Anyway, I'm now off to bed - a little fearful of all the things I mite find there. But my fear won't be long-lived because I have just ordered Protect-a-Bed's Ultimate Bedding Protection Kit for $239.99.

Stan - Thursday (safely in bed)

Work

2013-05-01T16:33:00.001-04:00

Water delivery - 1900s Iceland. Paid a pittance for wrenchingly hard work despite its importance.

Today is the first of May, in Iceland much as elsewhere in the world. It is one of our thankfully numerous national holidays and is in place to honour labourers. Although its origins go back to 1889 in Paris, the first labour demonstrations on the first of May took place in 1923 in Iceland and it was not until 1966 that it became a public holiday.

A lot has changed since then. Most of our labour leaders look like chairmen from a corporate board, they wear suits and drive expensive cars – allowed a more lavish lifestyle than those they are to represent by quite high salaries paid out of the union members’ fees. Although I am not a labourer and would suck at it – I would prefer my union leader to be more akin to an actual labourer than a bank manager. I would also like to see more female labour leaders in a country that prides itself on being pretty darn good when it comes to gender equality.

So as to avoid any misunderstanding – there are some good labour leaders here that seem to have at one point held a tool in their hand and not solely a pen or a handkerchief. And there are some women.

I am not a political analyst. But one can’t but help hear the rhetoric come elections and on the average weekday when in the papers. It seems to me that when it comes to politics nowadays, no one is as much as pretending to champion a labourer’s cause. There is simply no political movement that focuses on labour issues, aside from those related to the whole gender ratio thing. The left, which used to take workers under their wing appear to have abandoned the working class – left them to fend for themselves because they are too busy snuggling up to higher education. Don’t get me wrong, I am certainly not against university education. I just find it a bit of a stretch to think that this is what everyone wants to engage in. If someone wants to work in a day-care centre for the pittance on offer, why push this same person into first obtaining a master’s degree? This is now the case in Iceland, a lot of professions that did not require university degrees now do. Not because of any pressure from the people that do the jobs but by misguided political decisions and in some cases via pressure from the unions – probably propelled by the thought that an education requirement will automatically raise salaries in the field. Which does not happen and their people end up worse off, now paying student loans from their meagre salaries and having lost three to five years of employment while they obtain the required degrees.

And why is there no one promoting the trades or encouraging those so inclined to go for it? Perhaps it boils down to naivety for lack of a better descriptive term. A lot of people now look down on hard work although they do not realise it. Quite the opposite. They believe themselves to be freethinkers and liberal. But they really aren’t. Is there something less fancy about being a carpenter than being an economist as an example? No. Of course not.

As is typical of Iceland my group of friends and my extended family do all sorts of thing for a living. You do not socialise within a single layer of the social strata here. That is not possible, we are too few and too close for such arrangements. My maternal grandfather was a day labourer at the docks. His life was hard. Today it would be easier, thanks to the progress the unions have made.

So hats off to labourers and unions on this 1^st of May – may your days be laden with choices between well-paid jobs offered by honest and fair employers.

In time and with increased prosperity and enlightenment of the poor in the underdeveloped countries in the world, labour unions will rise in places such as Bangladesh. The radio just announced the death toll in the sweat shop collapse as being 400 people. For the people that died within the concrete rubble, change will come too late. For countless others it cannot come too soon.

Yrsa - Wednesday

A Sunday in Paris: Memorial for the Deportees and Victims

2013-04-30T03:15:00.002-04:00

This Sunday in Paris was the National Day Memorializing those Deported during the German Occupation. Every year since 1954 it's been organized with the children of the Deportee's and their families participating along with a dwindling number of survivors of the Shoah, what the French call the Holocaust.

The street to the Centre de Juive, the Jewish Center was closed to anyone without an invitation. As you can see the 'flic's were doing their job. Even my friend Naftali, in his 80's a Resistant who'd forgot his invitation, wasn't allowed to enter so we had to walk around the block.

The small ceremony at the Wall of Names had ended so we joined the cortege, the parade of survivors, families, and military and ministers and the Mayor walking over to Ile de la Cité. Doesn't he look like de Gaulle?

Michelle, Naftali's friend in purple on the left, spoke with Henri who wore his own camp clothes from Struthof-Natzweiler, the only concentration camp in France. The same camp, where Naftali's father was interned and executed, is in Alsace-Lorraine. Henri made every step of the march. Hen

What ceremony wouldn't be complete without a Rothschild, in the grey suit + grey hair, kissing a ladies hand. This Rothschild is a sponsoring director of the Centre de Juive.

After the march across the Ile Saint-Louis we made it to the Deportation Memorial behind Notre Dame and various ministries and groups laid wreaths, speeches were made and a beautiful poem by Robert Desnos, a deportee, read.

It took awhile before I realized Bertrand Delanöe, the Mayor of Paris, stood in front of us and he consented to a photo with me.

Naftali's friends, Annick who was born in 1924, on the left with the medals and Pierette, born in 1918, with the stylish purple hat were Agents de liaison in Lyon during the war. Between them they made and distributed false identity cards, underground papers and assisted families of those arrested.

What is amazing is that these 80 and 90 years old made it (some walked part of the way down the Champs Elysees!) to the Arc de Triomphe for the last part of the ceremony. More speeches, laying of wreaths, the military band played le Marseilleise twice, and we all stood in the cold for almost two hours in the chill April evening. The young ones (in their 70's and early 80's) held the heavy flags for almost an hour, considered an honor, and I wondered how they did it with the cold updraft that whips thru the Arc de Triomphe.

Naftali invited Pierette and Annick, (her Resistance name) to talk and we repaired to Cafe des Dames, chosen by Annick. Notice the photo collage behind her. I taped a lot of their conversation but both were clear on one point, the Resistance was only 2% of the population and the Collaborators 2% and de Gaulle made a myth of la Resistance to unify a damaged France.

Pierette, without her stylish hat, was denounced in Lyon in 1944 and sent on the last convoy of deportees. She was interned in Ravensbruck almost a month before it was liberated but it took her a year via various displaced persons camps to get back to France. Annick, was denounced, and held in the infamous Lyon prison run by Klaus Barbie. Her interrogator was Barbie's second in command and she missed the firing squad by two people. During dinner Annick turned to me and said 'in three years Pierette will be one hundred, hard to believe, eh, she lives by herself, like I do and we still take the Metro.'
Cara - Tuesday
PS it's the last day to enter the sweepstakes to win a killer trip to Paris and join me here in October http://www.parisisformurder.com/rules.html bon chance

Indiana Jones in Africa -- a guest post from author Susan C. Shea

2013-04-28T03:09:00.000-04:00

I'm delighted to introduce author/friend, Susan C. Shea! Susan writes the Dani O’Rourke Mystery series. The first is Murder in the Abstract and the sequel is The King’s Jar, publishing May 1. You can read more about her at www.susancshea.com.

Even before I stood over two super-sized shipping containers, checking off a list that included everything from Cal tee shirts and collection baggies to Kool Aid packets and malaria medicine, I was fascinated by the stories of scientist explorers who went to Africa to look for evidence of a time before recorded history when large animals roamed a very different landscape, and primates descended from the trees and began to develop rudimentary hunting and foraging skills.

Imagine my excitement when I was hired as ED of the non-profit started by the scientist who had previously found “Lucy,” the 3.2 million-year old fossil that changed the way anthropologists viewed human evolution. Suddenly, I was working at the heart of paleo (old) anthropology, with a group of men and women who spent months at a time in the hot, dry, ancient river beds of Africa’s Great Rift Valley sifting crusty dirt in search of tiny fragments of fossilized bone, and guarded by tribesmen with old Russian Kalashnikov rifles.

I was surprised with an award at the annual Institute dinner at the Metropolitan Club in New York, 1997. The Club features in THE KING'S JAR, albeit in slightly disguised form. With Bruce Ludwig, Donald Johanson and Yves Coppens. Yves was the head of the French Musee des Hommes in Paris, and a fellow anthropologist with Don. Bruce was a member of the Institute's board, one of a handful who were also members of the Explorer's Club, and quite a dashing presence! Photo credit: Anita & Steve Shevett

My sweetheart bought me a pith helmet to celebrate, but the scientists and post-docs who went to the field wore less glamorous, wide brimmed, floppy hats. They wore khaki shorts and hiking boots and the smart ones wore long sleeve dress shirts to fend off the intense sun. They looked out for snakes and large biting bugs when they went to the outdoor lav, ate Ethiopian injera and wat (goat stew on a pale, spongy bread) rather more often than ideal, and went on to find 200 small fragments of what would turn out to be a remarkably complete fossilized skull of Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy’s species).

That skull brought the national morning news programs to our headquarters at four in the morning, national and international reporters from every strong newspaper, magazine, and wire service to interview the scientists, another National Geographic cover, the cover of Time, Newsweek, Scientific American…you get the drift.

It wasn't all hard work. Renowned photographer of African peoples and cultures Carol Beckwith (half of the noted team of Beckwith and Angela Fisher, authors of African Ceremonies and frequent National Geographic contributors) at a costume party in Napa. That's my Tim holding on to her leg! The scientists and people associated with the Institute became close and loyal friends due, I think, to the kind of intense effort they made, often without any assurance of success or comfort along the way. That they accepted me and drew me in as a friend was - and is - a great gift.

I never got to the dig site. Too busy raising money and keeping things running smoothly at home so the scientists could focus on doing what they did best. But when it came time to plan the next Dani O’Rourke mystery, I knew I wanted to incorporate some of that charged atmosphere and Indiana Jones romance of exploration into the book. I tried to weave it together with my own history as a fundraiser, courter of millionaires, billionaires and assorted overly-entitled people. And that’s where The King’s Jar landed, here in the States, with a cast of characters deeply influence by the demands of working in present-day Africa in search of the origins of humankind.

Lisa....Sunday....

Spring Blooms in Greece

2013-04-27T00:00:00.000-04:00

Ahh, tomorrow I fly back to Greece. I’m heading straight on to Mykonos to spend Easter week there, though my flight out of JFK into Athens bounces me through Constantinople. No carrier flies directly into Athens from NYC (at least not yet) and Turkish Airlines offers by far the best price on flights into Athens from the US. Go figure.

I can’t wait. I bet when I mention Greece the first thing you think of is either the Acropolis or deep-blue island seas. For those of you who think pyramids, well, you’re close but no cigar. But there’s another side to Greece few ever see. It’s Greece’s fertile mainland countryside, filled in springtime with blooms of almond, walnut, cherry, pear, apple, anemone, poppy, daisy, wisteria, rosemary, artichoke, and on and on…

I had dinner last night with a close friend visiting from Greece who shared some photographs she’d taken a few weeks back by a place approximately 26.2 miles from Athens. I leave these for you to enjoy as I head off to experience them in person. Hey don’t be jealous, I have allergies!

And of course, what pictorial portrait of Greece would be complete without at a venerable olive tree!

Jeff—Saturday

Keep on running!

2013-04-26T01:30:00.000-04:00

Shortly after completing the New York Marathon in 1979, Chris Brasher wrote an article for The Observer newspaper. He said 'To believe this story you must believe that the human race be one joyous family, working together, laughing together, achieving the impossible. Last Sunday, in one of the most trouble-stricken cities in the world, 11,532 men and women from 40 countries in the world, assisted by over a million black, white and yellow people, laughed, cheered and suffered during the greatest folk festival the world has seen.'

Chris pace making for Roger Bannister's sub 4 minute mile

Nothing that happened in Boston will dull that spirit one iota. So whatever those two bombers did, for whatever reason, they picked on the wrong people. This year’s London Marathon, six days after the Boston atrocity, saw a step up in security (40% more police) but not one runner pulled out.

More than 800,000 people lined the course to cheer the runners on for the biggest one day fund raiser that the world has ever seen (over 900 million dollars over the years). The 37 000 London runners ran with black ribbons in tribute, there was a 30 second silence at the start with more than a few tears. Runners and spectators remained defiant.

Some years ago, I was lying on a hospital bed with a neurosurgeon tapping my reflexes and scraping my feet. He was telling jokes and I was feeling nothing- literally. A spinal fracture had caused my brain to fall out with my legs. He said something along the lines of 'getting you back on your feet might prove difficult'. I said “Can I run a marathon?” He joked "Could you run one before?"

Two years later, I stood on the starting line of the London Marathon, with 36,000 others, each with a story to tell. Mine was ...ok ... bad spinal injury, couldn’t walk for a while, had to retrain to do that but discovered a talent for writing books that I never knew I had. Always a silver lining!! I went from weeks of lying down, to swimming, tipping wheel chair into a pool, then walking with two crutches, then one, then a stick then unaided ... all the way to running 26 miles 385 yards. Well maybe running is a bit of a stretch.... kind of limpy jogging, like an elephant with gout.

There is something beautiful and pure about marathon running. It’s not running against anybody else, it’s you against the distance, the fatigue, the pain and that wee voice in your head that says over and over again ... why are you doing this?

When I ran the Marathon it was sponsored by Flora margarine so we all ran with 'Flora' on our vests. The crowd shouted “come on Flora” about 12,000 times. It did encourage us to pick up the pace a bit just to get away from the racquet. I wonder what the runners have to endure now that it is sponsored by Virgin!

All the charity runners - even huge big hairy blokes- cross the line and cry. Some bend over to ease their breathing, some stretch, some whoop, some look at their watch to check their time (or their pulse to see if they have really survived), others get carted away by stretcher but they all wipe away a tear.

There are things that happen in a marathon that would occur under no other circumstances. The mere act of running quicker to catch up with a Viking longboat while being chased by some Mr Men is one I distinctly remember. The army run as a team. I don’t know what the technical term is but they move with a peculiar gait that is not a march and not a jog, it's a in between. They have full pack on, pounding the concrete. You can hear them coming up behind you for miles, moving in perfect synchrony. Somewhere behind them was a
herd of rhinos.

The Army team, the Viking longboat and the rhinos run as a group so they line up right at the back of the massed start. This makes sense as they would cause a pile up if any keen charity runners went off too quickly and ran smack into the back of them. So the mass runners go forward, safe in the knowledge that they will hear the chomp, chomp, chomp- the crowd starts to cheer - everybody gets a wee bit patriotic and a steward will stand and part the runners like Canute. If you don't gently move to the side, you will be trampled.

Being a charity runner I didn’t give a hoot who overtook me. My friend, a GP, stopped at a cafe for a cappuccino ... twice! She came up with some medical excuse about calcium depletion, caffeine and fluids (double shot latte in other words). My other friend always wanted to break the three hour mark. He managed a 3.02 in a Paris Marathon, hitting the wall at 24 miles and was very upset. He turned up at London in peak condition and collided with a banana on the final turn. He was furious this time, going through the barrier at 3.01. That was about twenty years ago and he still goes into a mood if you mention it... which I do, frequently.

Basically, the marvellous thing about marathon running is that you are all in it together and the spirit of friendship and fellowship amongst the runners is an experience that you probably take to your deathbed.

In keeping with that spirit, the Virgin London Marathon has pledged to donate £2 for every runner that finished the event to The One Fund Boston. And I am sure that many other ‘pledgers’ will dig a little deeper into their pockets.

Running at its core is a very honest thing to do, one foot in front of the other. The marathon is the culmination of weeks/months of training. Because the London Marathon is early in the year, the training for Scots and other northern Europeans has to be through a cold hard winter. The charity runners, who will have full time jobs, will be up at 5am in sub zero temps, running through the dark night air. It always made me feel like a ghost.

I wrote the following at the time of my first marathon. These are my memories of milling around the start in Greenwich Park, scared. Very scared.

There was a strawberry in the corner rubbing Vaseline on its nipples, absorbed in its task, greasy fingers dipped in and out the pot, the hands moving from the chest to the inner thighs. He had been at it for ages.

A mobile phone rang, the strawberry extended a green stalk, passing the phone to the elephant standing next to it. The elephant flapped his ears in gratitude; it was a trunk call one would suppose.

Silence fell as Cher emerged from the toilets, six foot four, dressed in a leather vest with a black g-string and tinfoil-posing pouch. He was wearing three-inch stilettos, a constipated smile and far too much make up. He teetered up to the end of the queue and took his place between two nuns.

A chicken got stuck in the portaloo the transvestite had vacated; unable to manage the narrow door for itself. He had to be pulled out tail first. He fluffed his feathers to regain some dignity, plumping himself up against the wasps that were now homing in on us, attracted by the smell of banana skins, ralgex and Lucozade.

Then it was time. We stood still, in reverential silence, alone with our thoughts of the pain that had passed and the pain to come.

Without exception, we put up a silent prayer as one single shot split the air.

I jogged round my first marathon and I remember seeing the green sign, 26 miles. Tired to the core, legs on automatic pilot, knowing that I could not stop because if I did I might never start again, then the final corner into the Mall.... then angels pick you up at that point ... I was humming swing low sweet chariot..., the crowd were going mad ... for me and the other 36,000 no doubt. But I did it...

And after watching that today...

I'm getting the itch to do it again...

Caro

Watching the Marathon GB 26.04.13

PS If you are ever in a crowded train carriage and someone is talking loudly on their mobile phone and being very annoying, just pick up your own phone and say the first line about the strawberry very loudly. Put your phone down. Look out the window. Say nothing. You will notice that all will have gone very quiet.

Deadly Harvest

2013-04-25T09:00:00.000-04:00

Next week (April 30^th) sees the release of the new Detective Kubu mystery DEADLY HARVEST. Naturally we wanted to tell you about it, but we decided to let Kubu himself talk about it instead.

We were in Botswana at the beginning of the month so we lured him away from the Criminal Investigation Department of the Botswana police by offering him lunch at one of his favorite restaurants – the Caravela, a great Portuguese restaurant in Gaborone with an interesting background. (We reported on it in an earlier blog.)

Once we had settled down and Kubu had regretfully passed on the wine because he was on duty, we chatted. Of course we are old friends so we used his nickname “Kubu”, which means hippopotamus in the Setswana language. Kubu doesn’t mind. It is part of his persona and has been with him since his school days at the Maru a Pula school.

Michael asked him about being a detective in Botswana.

Kubu laughed. “I thought you’d want to talk about food and recipes! You know there’s a cook book out now as an e-book with my favorite African dishes? Sometimes I think I’m better known as a gourmet than a detective. But don’t ask me to be the cook! By the way shall we order? Joy says I should have a salad for lunch. It’s part of my diet. So I’ll start with the avocado salad. It’s excellent. Then I’ll have the peri-peri whole chicken. I really recommend that. We can wait till after the main course before we order the desserts.”

While we were wondering about the salad ‘diet’ and whether we’d brought enough pula to pay for all these courses, Kubu returned to the subject of police work.

“Michael, you have to understand that Botswana is a very big country. The size of France. Less than two million people though. We have about twenty main police centers, but they all have a lot of area to cover and lots of places for criminals to hide. And the countryside is very diverse. We’ve got the huge Kalahari desert with very low population – mainly Bushmen. There’s the lush northern area along the Chobe and Linyanti rivers, with all that spectacular wildlife. But, at Kazangula, Botswana has a joint border with three other countries – Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Namibia. Think of the smuggling possibilities that offers. Then there are the cities like Gaborone and Francistown, nothing like Johannesburg, but they have their share of crime.”

We’re very interested in the situation with the Bushman peoples of Botswana, so Stan asked about it. Kubu sighed.

“It’s such a difficult issue. Some of the Bushmen want to live a nomadic life in the Kalahari like their ancestors, but most want the comforts of modern life, education for their children, health care, and so on. The government is bound by the constitution to supply those things, but they can’t do it if people are in a different place every day. One needs a consensus from the people involved – particularly the Bushmen - as to how to move forward, and that didn’t happen. It ended up in the High Court, and Judge Unity Dow gave a judgment in the Bushmen’s favor. But it will take time for the Bushmen to find their role in modern Botswana.”

Courtyard at the Caravela. Photo: J Everitt

We really wanted to know about muti murders: people – especially children – being murdered so that witch doctors can use their body parts for black magic. It’s a scary practice becoming more, rather than less, prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa, and it provides the backstory of DEADLY HARVEST. Michael asked Kubu how these cases were handled in Botswana.

He hesitated, then said: “You must understand that most witch doctors do good. They have a variety of herbal remedies, usually supplied with a dash of good advice or a prayer. My father is a herbalist, although recently… Well, that’s another story. Now a few witch doctors might add animal parts – like the heart of a lion to give the client strength. But a very few – reputed to be the most powerful – use human body parts. Children are abducted. It’s horrible. And the culprits are very hard to find because the victims aren’t related in any way to their abductors. Worse, everyone is too scared of the witch doctors to give information. Even some policemen are nervous. Not me, of course.”

Shangaan fetishes Photo. Alex Zaloumis

We said we found it hard to credit that modern educated people still believed in these types of potions, but Kubu shook his head. “It’s supposed to give the evil witch doctors tremendous power, shape changing, invisibility. The witch doctor I had to deal with in the Deadly Harvest case was thought to be invisible. As you can imagine, it was a very hard case to solve. Fortunately the CID has a new detective – a woman believe it or not – who really pushed us to make progress. We got to the bottom of it all together.” He paused. “These cases really shake things up. There is the infamous case of a young girl, Segametsi Mogomotsi, which occurred in Mochudi in 1994. She and her friend were selling oranges and became separated. Segametsi disappeared and her mutilated body was found weeks later. Segametsi’s murder caused the community to come out in violent protests because they believed the police were protecting the witch doctors’ powerful clients. One person was shot and killed by a policeman. The government eventually felt it necessary to conduct an independent enquiry, so it called in Scotland Yard from the United Kingdom.”

From The Star newspaper. Courtesy Alex Zaloumis

We nodded. We had heard about that awful case at our first meeting with the previous director of the CID, Tabathu Mulale. The Scotland Yard report was never released and the case remains unsolved. To lighten the rather somber mood, Stan asked: “Have you ever met Precious Ramotswe? You’re sort of in the same line of work.”

Kubu laughed. “No, not really. She’s that lady private investigator? She solves people’s problems, but I’m after murderers. She’s very resourceful, but our cases don’t overlap much. Maybe I’ll bump into her one day.”

At that point the food arrived, and that was all we could get out of Assistant Superintendent David “Kubu” Bengu.

Michael and Stanley – Thursday
http://www.detectivekubu.com
http://www.facebook.com/MichaelStanleyBooks

On the road ... again

2013-04-24T18:24:00.002-04:00

I am in Munich, participating in the Munich Crime Festival. In Iceland it is snowing, here the weather is wonderful. Unfortunately I am unbale to write anything witty or even in the least bit smart so I will let a few photos from Bavaria do the talking. Europe never ceases to amaze me, coming from a country that was dirt poor when rulers were allowed to spend a nation's money on monumental buildings:

Yrsa - Wednesday

on the streets of Paris

2013-04-23T10:08:00.003-04:00

I'm just back from the LATimes Book Festival and preparing to leave for Paris so here's a few shots of the City of Light.

Cara - Tuesday